The Art of Landscapes
Steina, Mynd, 2000, installation view, Steina: Playback, 2024, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Photo: Dario Lasagni.
Sitting in the midst of Borealis (1993), a two-channel video projection split across four vertical panels, much comes to mind. The piece is captivating, both from the perspective of an art viewer, and, as someone who works with nonhuman environments in various capacities. Borealis was featured in the recent exhibition Steina: Playback, organized by MIT List Visual Arts Center in collaboration with the Buffalo AKG Museum. A pioneering video artist, Steina has roots in Buffalo, teaching alongside her partner Woody Vasulka in the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo in the 1970s.
Borealis puts the viewer into a state of flux. The images of water pour across each seven-by-fourteen-foot panel, flowing in different directions. Reverse, inverse, and opposite; coursing and cascading into one another off-screen. One’s insides churn in response, questioning the physical realities of the gallery space. The projection begins with an otherworldly self, a figure surrounded in mist. This is likely the artist, but can also, possibly, be any person within the exhibition space. Or is the figure a body cast into or from the vapors of Icelandic waves (or Niagara Falls)? The projection shifts into faster river flows and in the next scene, crashing, roaring waves. A vehement frothing follows. As processed video, the water is visually more than water. It’s a dynamic, purple-tinged and porous landscape that is both less and more than natural; it is a mediated landscape best suited for affecting the viscera of viewers.
Steina, Lava and Moss, 2000, installation view, Steina: Playback, 2024, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Photo: Dario Lasagni.
The work’s four-channel soundscape aides its somatic impact. Unlike the video, which quickly pulls the viewer in, the heavily technologized sound exists and remains outside, mediating the space and the body. The sonic range reaches toward the sublime, just enough to discourage disbelief. These juxtapositions of image and sound create a confluence of alternative, “more-than” natures that redefine place. The sound and video projection together rhythmically synthesize a new layer of reality that sits atop the room like compost on last year’s soil. Borealis ends with a flutter of rapid camera movements, quick back-and-forth close-ups of Icelandic plants that force a collision between the self and plant, rendering the viewer mindless, a pollinator without any will.
In such ways, Borealis (and many of Steina’s other works) is not unlike the landscape of a garden—if we understand the act of gardening itself as the superimposition onto space of deeply rooted human ideas of beauty that can be read like a palimpsest or a sedimentary composition of historical ideals. The exhibition continues with the projection works Mynd, (from the Icelandic word for “picture”) and Lava and Moss (both 2000). The media architectures unique to each work cultivate environments as phenomenal experiences. Techno-utopian forms overlay images that, in turn, amend perceptible space, like compost on soil. These new media forms seem to insinuate that “God” (Steina’s term), or at least nature, can be represented within them.
In this exhibition, technology is more than just hidden projectors, screens, and walls that intervene to create new spaces. All become art forms themselves: projectors mounted on scaffolded frames jut out from corners and walls at geometric angles (Mynd); mis-keyed projections work to simulate a rugged terrain (Mynd); TVs stacked into a curvilinear altar that is itself an electrified landform (The West, 1983); even the heavy curtains that pull you closer, like a bryophytic embrace (Lava and Moss). Mynd’s multi-media architectures saturate the walls green, transfiguring the gallery into something geological, like marble. Mynd becomes a veritable emerald city of pixels, its video processing giving its images a raw minerality—filtered, polarized, and at times still and gem-like. Its topographical images are snapshots, crystalline but in motion across the gallery walls.
Steina, Borealis, 1993, installation view, Steina: Playback, 2024, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Photo: Dario Lasagni.
In her essay for the exhibition’s catalogue, Ina Blom notes that the mechanics of Steina’s work are important visual subjects in the spaces the artist creates. With insight, she writes that “’Landscape,’ (in the context of Steina’s work), is no longer a representational genre but a perceptual device, a vision system—.” Here the image is what is life-like. With complex installation architectures, the images become all-encompassing, environmental. Alive . . . ish. The image is wrapping, moving, articulating, climbing, mounting, resounding, like a living landscape. To Blom’s point, it is what forces us into believing the two—landscape and image— are or at least can be the same. Steina accomplishes this in gallery spaces of tech-driven sensory immersions. Our ability to walk through and around Borealis while awash in moving images and sound is what allows us to see ourselves as the shadowy figure in the mist. Overcome. Not by water but by synthetic representations of it.
Steina’s practice of conflating ways of seeing landscape with landscape itself is in conversation with other major historical works, ranging from Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan (2012) to the epics of Hudson River School painters Frederick Edwin Church and Thomas Cole to the visually dynamic scenes of OpArt. Nam Jun Paik, Steina’s contemporary, set similar precedents for interpreting technological mediums as new forms of nature in art with works such as TV Garden (1974). In Paik’s work, a field of television sets becomes a living, electrified landscape. At the same time, the Land and Eco art movements of the 1960s and 1970s brought “landscape” conceptually, representationally, or physically to the forefront of many art practices (and genres, intersectionally, as some have written). Steina admits the influence of Land artists on her work, despite the seeming disparities between Land and Video arts’ mediums and practices. In another catalogue essay, Ecology, Zach Ngin writes that although Steina’s work could be thought of as Land Art it might be more productive to consider it alongside the immense, panoramic forms of nineteenth century landscape painting. Steina’s works do not confront the white box of the gallery in favor of open landscapes for the socio-political reasons that motivated early Land artists; in fact, her works necessitate and are constituted by these walls. However, like much Land art, Steina’s installations “dislocate” the viewer and address questions of place.
Steina, Geomania, 1986, installation view, Steina: Playback, 2024, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Photo: Dario Lasagni.
Steina’s work is not not Land art. Like Steina’s processed videos, Land art has never truly been a presentation of environments themselves but a juxtaposition against them—an extraction and reconfiguration that allows for new ways of seeing something as something else, something new. They are interventions within the environments that we categorize as landscapes that, in turn, create new landscapes. They are monuments in an expanded field of meaning that recreate and redesignate place. And these media infrastructures even, to a degree, parallel Robert Smithson’s non-sites, functioning in new materialist ways to reconstitute, compartmentalize, and map landscape. Are Steina’s works “landscape unhinged from perspective and distance?” Or instead, a landscape suddenly brought into closer view and reidentified?
As a practicing horticulturist, what interests me about Steina’s work is what it means to re-present nonhuman environments within the landscape of the art world. When artists intervene to reimagine such places and present them to human audiences in a new-to-us way—either in the form of a garden or as an image—they are reworking them into something else, something human. They are translating and refining an environment’s nonhuman qualities (like functioning biodiverse ecologies; or, in the case of Borealis, physical processes like gravity), into a visual language system that only humans understand—a landscape. Artists create art in and as such recognizable forms to speak within our human understanding, and not within that of the actual pollinators or aquatic organisms that inhabit these spaces (though they might find Steina’s work cool, too).
In these scenarios, and in the diverse genre of landscape art, I can’t help but wonder about our allegiances to nonhumans and nonhuman environments. Do other-than-human beings deserve some form of agency and representation in contemporary art practices—and if so, how? What are the larger implications of creating a new world of artificial natures, one of only human-centered landscapes? The problems (and proliferation) of monocultures as a planting methodology are well-known, but what about those of a monospecies of images? What are the costs of reidentifying the world as a place where everywhere is a commodity for human consumption, visual and otherwise? What are the implications of representing only human perspectives on nonhuman environments in a world where, so often, seeing is believing? Per Steina, “a large part of humanity wants meaningless but pretty images.” What happens when such a desire proliferates scenic, Instagram-able, and easy to understand landscapes in place of the life-sustaining and meaningful ecological complexities of nonhuman environments?
Amanda Besl, Temple of Hortus, 2025, installation view, University at Buffalo Art Galleries.
Photo: Nicholas Ostness.
With these questions and the Steina exhibition in mind, I also wonder about the role of commodification in defining the boundaries between landscape and art, and the genre of landscape art itself. Specifically, about the role commodification plays in defining it. As ecological organisms we are phenomenological creatures. We are sensorially located by environmental stimuli and are found and constituted by them. Study after study has affirmed the human health benefits of participating within natural, nonhuman environments, confirming deep linkages between the two. Scientists have shown that even representations of vegetal environments, like images of forests and flowers, can produce positive cognitive responses in human subjects. Images of natural environments like Steina’s, or even installations of potted plants like Rashid Johnson’s A Poem for Deep Thinkers, currently at the Guggenheim New York, might seem like easy art-fodder, grabbing our attention followed by positive cognitive responses to such representations. Whatever their intention, these works do not intend to represent plants as a living autonomous being, but use nature or plant as a symbol for human redefinition and communication. In this way, Johnson’s plants are instead as reflective of the human figure as his Jack Whitten-esque mirror mosaics.
Amanda Besl’s Temple of Hortus, recently shown at University at Buffalo Art Galleries’ CFA Gallery, brings this argument back to Buffalo. Besl’s multimedia installation considers our desires for what we wish plants to be. In this case, art objects that become visually plant-like in the artist’s “eco gothic” style. These are plants as symbols, referents that establish a currency of exchange between the artist and her audience, attempting to engage us with meaningful cultural critiques. In Besl’s work, plant and art object are synonymous. Her practice, like Johnson’s, takes plants as surface points of reflection on human social histories. In his case, these are personal psychologies and social ecologies and in hers, Victorian economies and pastoral fetishizations of the Other. The exhibition alleges to blur the boundaries between natural and artificial. It does so in formal and methodological ways. Lines between representing the vegetal environment, art, commodity, and specific histories are mangled by human desires to reidentify plants as objects: specimens devoid of ecological context. Mounted. Contained. Circumscribed. Besl’s beautifully crafted sculptures are arranged in bell jar terrariums on a gallery shelf, as artworks. Their physiologies are orchid-like and mutated, assembled from parts contributed by Cattleya Alliance and Dendrobium hybrids and, with leaves and flowers inspired by the nothogenus Oncostele, roots taken from Phalaenopsis, and stamens possibly from the vining tropical plants of the Passiflora genus. All of these sculptures are representative of living plants but are truly artifacts of the human mind, rendered as structural or decorative objects in a vegetal landscape of Besl’s making. They are the delicately crafted images of Besl’s paintings come to life in resinous sculptural forms. In horticulture, we speak of anomalies as an environmental or cultural product: in plant cultivation, stemming from genetic hybridization; in conditions of care, such as environmental temperature and water fluctuations, or pathogenic influence; or in the evolutionary adaptations by which orchids have diversified to become one of the largest plant families. However, Besl’s Orchid Anomalies are made anomalous by the artist herself.
Amanda Besl, Temple of Hortus, 2025, installation view, University at Buffalo Art Galleries.
Photo: Nicholas Ostness.
Maybe such lovely, poetic reconfigurations are enough to inspire recognition of the vitality a living medium can convey and the ways that engaged art practices can adequately represent the nonhuman Other. And maybe they do speak to us of the hurdles cultivated plants have faced throughout eons of human-plant sympoesis. And maybe we can see them for their ontological selves—what the philosopher Michael Marder calls “plant-thinking,” or identifying the receptive, fruitful nature of plants. Still, there is a line between what we want to see and what is, between a living being and an image, between a living environment and its reflection as landscape art. Maybe images of plants and nonhuman environments as referents run the risk of invading the mind like a plague of moths, deteriorating our understanding of what is in favor of what we think is. Maybe this happens too often, as in the literal plague of moths and white flies that swarmed the University at Buffalo’s Center for the Arts and other campus buildings following Marlene McCarty’s exhibition Into the Weeds in 2019. The artist’s improper (and irresponsible) stewardship of living plant and soil materials caused not only the destruction of a native ecology in the Lake Erie watershed, but also an insect infestation that inquisitive students spread across campus, much to the detriment of archival collections and greenhouse experiments.
Leaving the Steina show meant walking past the AKG’s new glass box theater and along the northwest wall of windows toward the Gundlach Building’s exit. The museum’s recent expansion resulted in the creation of ornamental landscape beds throughout the entire campus—essentially hundreds of feet of new gardens. These feature mixed plantings of native and nonnative herbaceous perennials, shrubs, and trees. Here, they were just on the other side of the glass. Over the past year, these beds have been allowed to run wild against the building’s highly refined exterior of marble and glass. Now, they are a shifting, eco-dynamic performance of herbaceous weeds, ornamental perennials, and woody plants. A time-based work of nature casting figural forms onto and inside the building. A piece exhibited in full sun and in darkness against the well-lit exterior like a large-scale landscape portrait in real time, an authentic moving panorama. Throughout this spring, many of us watched captivated as invasive yellow celandine, studded with native red columbine, blended into buttercups. Now in summer, overcome by swaths of amaranth and penstemon, the celandine has gone and the columbine remains hidden among the twisting filbert, hairy taxus, juvenile hornbeam, rambling cow vetch, and tall mullein. With gratitude to the Buffalo AKG for this seasonal outdoor exhibition, I can’t help but stop and ask myself what artwork in this incredible and inspiring gallery could be more avant-garde than its landscape that so abruptly and radically challenges the enculturation of our contemporary cultivated environments? And suddenly I see the bobbing sun hat of someone in the midst of all this vegetation, like a figure in the mist, trying to parse flowers from weeds with gloves on, bucket and trowel in tow.
Natalie Bell, “An Experiment in Real Time: Steina in Conversation” in Steina, ed. Natalie Bell (MIT Press, 2025), 36–37.
Ina Blom, “Video Space: Steina’s Version” in Bell, Steina, 137.
Jane McFadden, “Not Sculpture Along the Way to Land Art “ in Ends of the Earth Land Art to 1974 (Prestel Verlag, 2012), 43–44.
Bell, “An Experiment,” 36–37.
Zach Ngin, “Ecology” in Bell, Steina, 179–180.
McFadden, “Not Sculpture,” 54.
Ngin, “Ecology,” 180.
All “landscapes” as a taxonomical category are human constructs.
Bell, “An Experiment,” 34.
Robert Mitchell, Bioart and the vitality of media (University of Washington Press, 2010), 35-51. They were in the form of Edward Steichen’s delphiniums, which, as supported in this text, dawned the age of bioart at the New York Museum of Modern Art in the early twentieth century.
Steina, Lava and Moss (still), 2000. Three-channel high-definition video, color, sound, 15:09 min.
Courtesy of the Artist and Berg Contemporary, Reykjavik.
By John Santomieri
John Santomieri is a horticulturist by trade, academic and artist in practice, and working on doctoral research on the speculative landscapes shared between the disciplines of electronic and bio arts and architectural sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. By the way, if you’re looking for a garden or interiorscape, or art for that matter, or a combination of any of these things, he says he knows someone . . .
